Carol Schoonmaker's grandson was in quite a bind, if his backstory was to be believed.

As the Honeoye woman recalls about the telephone call she received, her grandson, who lived in Virginia, said he was calling from Houston. He and three friends were there for a wedding.

"After the wedding, they had a car accident and the police found a bag of drugs in the trunk of the rental car," Schoonmaker said in an email. "My grandson was taken to the hospital because his nose was broken when the airbag went off and hit him in the face. The other three were taken to jail and my grandson spent the night in the hospital, then was taken to jail."

Her grandson needed $4,000 for bail money. He gave his grandmother the name and number of a lawyer to call to send the money to.

"Getting more and more suspicious, I asked 'grandson' what the name of their new puppy was even though I did already know the answer. The caller hung up on me."

Of course, the call was a scam, one that these days seems to have been around almost as long as three-card monte. Yet the "grandparent scam," as it is commonly called, persists — and is especially active in December and January.

“It is true a lot of these phone scams really ratchet up around the holidays, particularly the grandparent scam," said Gary Brown, the elder abuse coordinator for the state Attorney General's Office. “It’s more believable that a young adult will be traveling around the holidays than they would other times around the year.”

This is often the pitch from the caller: The grandchild insists that he or she was out of town, somehow ended up in trouble — drunken driving perhaps — and needs bail money to get out of jail.

Collaborating with FBI

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Brighton Police Chief Mark Henderson said his police force has investigated allegations with these scams ranging from a loss of hundreds of dollars to a theft of nearly a quarter of a million dollars. Currently, he said, some Brighton investigators are collaborating with the FBI on a case that has taken them out of state.

"It's a very trusting generation," he said of the grandparents who are targets of the scams.

There are estimates that the scams work between 1 percent and 2 percent of the time. But the scammers can make hundreds of calls a day, so a few scores add up.

Schoonmaker's experience was fairly typical, and she employed a typical technique to thwart the scammer — ask a question that only the grandchild would know.

“Prevention is really the key," Brown said. "It’s virtually impossible to catch these people and even when they’re caught, the money is hardly ever recovered."

The Attorney General's Office is proactively trying to head off the scammers. For instance, Brown, who also heads the office's Westchester County regional office, goes into high schools, encouraging students to discuss the scam with grandparents and establishing passwords or questions that an inauthentic caller would not know.

Law enforcement agencies and Rochester's Lifespan elder abuse programs also provide programs with advice about stopping the scams.

The holidays do provide opportunities for families to discuss these scams as grandparents and relatives gather.